I know what you’re thinking. What an asshole. How could he do that to Laetitia? Hey, we aren’t dating or even close to it. Life presented me with a chocolate cake, why would I throw it away and eat sand? I did sneak out before Riley woke up though. I’m not an asshole I left a message telling her I was on the hunt and left her my contact details. I still couldn’t puzzle out the part about having help. She’s a kleen, not a chance she was going to help me hunt the motherfuckers down and pay them back in a very violent manner.

Going on the hunt part wasn’t really a lie, just a little misdirection. I was continuing on the snipe hunt that Cleo had sent me on. I didn’t truly believe what she left me in her bio, though the draw of it being real was simply too great of a temptation to pass up. That woman really did do her homework.

"Bevisste, you there?" I asked as I got on my bike heading towards where I thought the address to be. The sun was already setting, so I hoped I could get to the first one with a little light left.

"Yes I am Tom." She replied.

"How’s Catch?"

"Oh my God Tom. This has to be the best time of my life ever. No offense."

I laughed at how cute she was. "None taken. Hey did you happen to hear Riley say ’you will have help’?"

"Vaguely. I like to give you privacy during settings like that."

"You have any clue what she could mean by that? You can ask Catch if you trust him with my life mission."

"I thought blackmail and getting rich quickly was your lifs mission."

"So I have two life missions. You know I should have taken that bottle of Westchase with me."

"She probably would have woken up at the sound of the bottle clanking."

"I thought you were going to work on not being correct all the time."

Bevisste laughed at me. I hope her and Catch were trying to figure out what that cryptic message meant. There is just no chance a kleen is going to help me murder people. It is against their very nature. The sun had a better chance of rising in the north than a kleen had at helping me out with that level of violence. They were fantastic at logistics, the reason why they were in the military, they just drew the line at actively helping with violence.

"You are going in the correct direction. Take a right on One Drive in three miles and the assembly plant should be on the corner. Catch says it is a ten mile long building so even you should be able to figure out where it is." Bevisste said distractedly. I was beginning to feel like a voyeur. I wonder if that is how she felt.

"Thanks for the vote of confidence." I muttered and took a leisurely ride.

Crap. Laetitia had asked me to call her. She had specifically asked me to call her sometime during the day and I fucked even that up. I could tell why she only wanted to be friends with me. It was much easier being friends with a fuck up than date one and be around them every day for years. I would just never be good enough for a woman like her. The wars I had been through, the violence I had done had taken a toll on me. The atrocities seen and commited, destroying a wedding reception of msungs simply due to the fact that one General was at the reception is an atrocity I had a hard time forgetting, had destroyed the man that any woman would want to be with.

I can’t reason out why I have never been angry at the military and the Marine Corps for fucking up my life the way they did. I should have been furious at taking away my chance at being with Laetitia, instead I was furious at all the gutless cowards that called themselves TUP leaders. They shook their fists at the so-called horrors committed by SR, ignored the fist shaking on the SR side, beat their chests to show how serious they were, snapped their fingers and sent in ten thousand people to die to protect a piece of land that a really wealthy person wanted as a vacation spot or an energy company saw potential profits in. In the end none of the wars I was in acheived anything. It all looked exactly the same ten years after with maybe a handful of extra companies that had not previously been there for whatever the reason.

Now that I had made myself angry enough to watch the world burn I got off my bicycle to walk it. I needed to hit things and I needed a drink. Some person in ancient history once said ’beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy’. I wanted what God was giving me. Who was I to argue with him and make myself sad. While I walked to the counter of the liqour store I purposefully left my bike ten paces from the counter. I wanted someone to take it. I wanted Bevisste to tell me to I was being childish. I wanted to watch everything burn. I wanted to know why a group of people would go out of their way to brutalize what amounted to small children.

I had finally pinpointed the true reason for why I was so angry at the group Laez had belonged too.

"Kleens are like incredibly brilliant little children Bevisste. They do not know enough to fight back at someone bigger and don’t understand why that someone bigger is beating them. Will Catch get in my way?" I tilted the bottom of the bottle up and began to drink quickly.

"He will not. That building he had charge of did not belong to Linden Cartel. It has been vacant for about a year that is why they choose it." Bevisste replied.

I had heard that name. Most people in the military had heard that name. Most people alive had heard that name. I didn’t know why I had heard that name.

"Uhh, Bevisste? Why have I heard that name before? It seems to me like it should trigger a memory as if you said my mom was running the show." I asked.

"Slow down on the beer Tom. Linden Cartel were famous during your second enlistment. They tried to take over the entire planet of Balance. It was a four year war before they were pretty much destroyed. I suppose they were not completely destroyed. Catch says they are rebuilding their empire quickly."

"So that’s why Helios suffered Laez. Shit, I hope he’s alright. The ass on that body is just too fine a thing to lose." I said wistfully, if there was anything that could detour my mind from thinking on the wars I had been in it was alcohol and the body Helios ran in, and Laetitia and I suppose Cleo though those four arms weirded me the fuck out.

"Yes Tom because Helios losing the body of a woman is the tragedy here." Bevisste deadpanned.

"Have you actually looked at that ass? Laetitia is the only other person I have seen with an ass like that. I’ll bet Catch looks at your butt when you turn around." I said with a smile.

"Catch is a gentleman unlike some men I know."

"Gentleman is a term a single woman who read lots of romance novels made up. He doesn’t exist."

"I do not like you sometimes Tom."

"I love you too Bevisste." I blew her a few kisses and began laughing as I continued towards the enormous assembly plant. I wasn’t quite sure what i was going to find there though if Cleo was correct I would be rich after this and done doing inane stories for Pam.

The building was larger than I thought a building could be. It literally stretched on until I could no longer see the end, the far end being lost in darkness. It must have been a quarter of a mile wide and four floors tall. The mammoth proportions when I saw the end stretch to the horizon confused my mind. Why they needed such a large building to make holoscreens was beyond me.

"Is every holoscreen created produced here?" I asked Bevisste.

"Ninety-eight percent. When Timber won the patent effectively outlawing personal printers from creating holoscreens he had this building commissioned. The sheer size of it is awe inspiring. The records show it was made in less than six months as well."

"I suppose that is what can happen when you have more money than the universe. Where do I go in?" There was a fence five times the height of me surrounding the entire complex. I would have been shocked to learn it did not turn a would-be burglar into a frog or something. Not a chance it was just a normal everyday tall fence.

"The first entrance is coming up in four hundred feet. It’s unmanned. Say thank you to Catch." Bevisste prodded.

"Thank you Catch. You’re such a gentleman." I said with a grin and a bow.

"Do not be a jerk." Bevisste snapped.

Me? I mouthed. This was going to be an interesting rest of my life if she had a boyfriend. Which still made no sense. I stopped so suddenly I almost grabbed onto the fence to stop myself from stumbling then remembered I would most likely be turned into a horse or something else so I spun around and hopped. It must have looked like I was dancing like a lunatic.

"You’re sentient." I blurted out. I always thought for sure she was though I really did not know how to approach the subject. What if she was not? I would look like an idiot.

"The sad thing is I am pretty sure you cannot pass the Turing test." Bevisste replied dryly.

"You are! I always knew it!" I was stomping around waving my hands around like a mad man. "This is huge Bevisste! This is a fucking game changer. You’re not supposed to be sentient you’re just supposed to be quite smart."

Yes, people, those EEs in your eyes are actually a real intelligence grafted onto your body. Ah, symbiosis.

"That would mean you are incredibly stupid if I was not sentient. Did you ever think on that?" I think she was a little hurt that I was surprised she was a real intelligence and not just a series of complicated algorithms.

"Sorry Bevisste, I don’t mean to sound like an asshole."

"You just mean to sound like a jerk?" Bevisste asked. I could definitely tell she was hurt.

"Come on Bevisste, give me a break!" Even I was semi-aware of how odd it had to have looked for me to be yelling at the air. "I had a feeling you were just more than a computer program.  The way you have saved my life countless times proves that. I just…I didn’t…It’s hard to explain."

"So why say it now?" Bevisste asked.

"I was just thinking on how hard it is going to be to live with you in your puppy love stage of the relationship with Catch."

"Now you know how I’ve felt all these years."

"You know, now that my final doubt has been squashed on whether or not you are a real person it is kind of weird." I was not sure how to broach the subject of the symbiotic relationship we had.

"You’ll get past it Tom. I’ve always known myself to be real person stuck to a real person like a parasite. That is actually how I viewed it at first. You were the parasite sucking my life blood of information. A few years after, you were around ten, I was grafted to your eyeballs my view changed and I viewed myself as the parasite. My view of our relationship went back and forth for years until the sand crawler incident. As you stared at Johnny my world changed much like yours. The parasite view disappeared and I viewed us as one body with two minds. I will tell you now that not every AR lens thinks that way. I believe it is because of what we went through that changed it all."

Well that changed my whole view on everything. It also brought back memories I never wanted to revisit. We had begun talking that day while I stared, unable to move my head, at Johnny’s mutilated corpse. It had been Bevisste who had prevented me from going one hundred percent insane. Without a doubt I lost a lot of my sanity that day, though without Bevisste I would have lost my humanity as well.

"You going to go in or stand outside all night?" Bevisste asked me.

I had sat down on the ground sometime during her explanation and didn’t realize it. "Oh, sure, why not. I’m here may as well go through it."

The imposing guard post was empty just as Bevisste had said it would be. The post was more like the entrance to a dinosaur exhibit than a simple shack that a bored guard stood at. I counted four Dansun Mrk.12 Repeaters along the arch that bridged both sides of the guard post. It was the first time I had seen the railguns outside of a warzone. Timber really cared about what was in there.

It took me a while to cross the small parking area. The sense of trepidation grew with each step I took. The sweat pouring off of me was not entirely due to the heat of the early evening.  If four military grade railguns were posted in plain sight, I wondered how many more weapons were coated in the same material as the city runner I came to Marland in. I wouldn’t know what shot me even if it was three feet away. Maybe that was a good thing.

"Is there a window I can look through around here?" I stood in front of an innocuous looking door. It was a simple double frosted glass door with no handles on the outside.

"Why? The door is in front of you, if you go through it you will be able to look around." Bevisste replied.

"I’m getting this vision of a Rosetop destroyer class laser sitting on the other side of that door specifically calibrated for my DNA."

"You are so melodramatic Tom." Bevisste scolded me.

"Do you know what those lasers do to you?! They don’t just vaporize you sending your ashes scattering on the wind! Those goddamn lasers atomize you! It will literally turn me into the basic building blocks of the universe! I don’t want to be the basic building blocks of the universe Bevisste! Even with my flaws I like me how I am!" I was actually whining. My nerves must have been beyond frayed. This getting kidnapped and looking over my shoulder business was getting to me.

"Unfortunately there are no windows. However that door opens to an elevator, I sincerely doubt they will have a two hundred foot long laser sitting in an elevator."

The voice of reason that Bevisste. By the end of my rant I had actually convinced myself a Rosetop laser was sitting behind that door. Of course nothing was behind the door except an elevator car. It was quite plain, a simple blue paint covering the walls and ceiling and non-skid silver metal on the ground. Bevisste or Catch, one of the two, activated the car sending it upwards.

I began tapping my foot. It was taking a long time for the car to go up even if it was going to the top floor. "Oops." I said when I heard a noise behind me and turned around to see the elevator car door open.

The inside of the place was as impressive as the outside. If it looked large on the outside it looked beyond comprehension on the inside. The scale of the building was mind-boggling. No support columns could be seen anywhere, it was one ten mile long unbroken room. I gapped at the sight of the enormous place without really seeing what was on the floor below me.

I finally pulled my eyes from trying to see the end of the room to the work floor below me and blinked several times. I stared for several minutes as my brain tried to reason out what I was looking at. Sure I was a bit drunk, not quite hammered, though what was below me would not have made sense to me even if I was one hundred percent sober.

They say curiosity can kill the soul. I had thought my soul died a long time ago during one of the wars I fought in.

It had not.

Apparently my soul was in pain and hiding for I felt a hurt on a level so deep that I have no other explanation for what hurt.

Below me stretching for as far as I could see were what looked like dogs with humans interspersed randomly. The thing that was wrong and hurt me beyond what I could describe is the msungs and humans below me were much too small to be adults.

"Bevisste?" My voice sounded odd to me.

"Holy shit Tom." She said softly.

"Can you…I don’t really want to see, but can you zoom in and show me one of the humans up close and one of the msungs?"

A large square appeared before me, an image of two humans and a msung on it as if the three were only a few feet away from me. The two human girls could not have been over the age of nine. I imagine the msung was around the same age.

I collapsed onto the catwalk staring at my feet. Thank the good Lord the zoomed in vision was tied to what I was looking at. I was a ship without an udder or an oar adrift at sea. I had absolutely no idea why Cleo wanted me to see this. I was expecting to have to dive into the records and find a bunch of undocumented workers maybe a year or two below the legal age of employment. That I would find a child slave labor practice never once, even briefly, entered my mind. How msungs were somehow in an assembly plant on a TUP world was something I would have to figure out after I figured out why child slave labor was being used by TimberAIR.

"Are you okay Tom?" Bevisste asked.

"I don’t know Bevisste. I truly do not know. Why are children putting together holoscreens? Why are humans employed by TimberAIR? Why are msungs down there with the human children? Why are there children putting together holoscreens Bevisste? Why? Why?"

I should have been furious. I should have begun tearing the walls down around me, ripping the doors open and freeing the children. Instead I was in in shock and numb. I had assumed my kind had stopped the practice of child labor and slave labor when we left Earth.

"Call Cleo. I need to speak to her. I need to understand why I’m seeing this."

"I’m trying right now."

I twisted on my butt to look out over the edge of the catwalk. I noticed oval drones moving amongst the children. I didn’t have to see what if anything the drones did, I knew exactly what they were. They are called overseers by pping. Pping use the drones on their colonies so the upper class citizens will not have to get their hands dirty. The machines were ruthlessly efficient.

"Hi Tom. How are you tonight?" She had the gall to act happy to see me.

"I’m horrible to tell the truth Cleo. Why are children putting together holoscreens for your father?"

She scrunched her forehead in confusion. "I could have sworn I told you that. I did mention the underage labor and undocumented workers did I not?"

"Underage is fifteen years old woman!" I yelled at her and most likely attracted the attention of some of the overseers. I had Bevisste and Catch, I wasn’t too worried. "Not nine year old little girls!"

She waved her hand at me as if I were being a dunce. "Don’t be so self-righteous Tom. Msung dogs are worthless creatures and my father is actually doing the world a favor by having those girls and boys in there. They would have turned out to be drug users and degenerates, now they are off the street and putting together goods upstanding citizens like you can enjoy. They are actually benefitting you Tom."

My mouth dropped open. She lived in a different reality than the one I lived in, that had to be the reason how she thought like she did. I closed my eyes and shook my head. "You are fucking horrible Cleo. You and your father are horrible people."

She laughed at me like I was being silly. "Open your eyes Tom. Look me in the eyes like a man and tell me how horrible I am."

I’m a fucking pushover when it comes to women and she somehow knew that. I think the beautiful ones can tell who the pushovers are. I knew if I opened my eyes I would not be able to tell her how horrible she was. I knew I would just plead to know why she let this go on. I couldn’t keep my eyes closed forever.

She is beautiful to the point that it is ridiculous. There was no possible way of me telling her, while I looked at her, that she is a horrible person. "Your father is a horrible person." At least I was able to get out half of what I wanted to say.

She winked at me. I was slowly beginning to forget what was happening in the factory below me.

"Why does he use children for labor? What exactly is the point of that?" I asked. Hopefully I could find out something from her.

"I told you that Tom. He’s doing everyone a favor by getting them off the street at a young age so they don’t grow up to be dregs of society; as for the msungs, who gives a shit. They are marginally better than the snails I eat at cocktail parties. Are you going to go to next address?" I stayed silent. I hated myself for not exploding on her. "I’ll make it worth your while Tom…" She licked her lips smiling seductively at me.

I was going to go to the next address no matter what I saw here. That I witnessed child slave labor was not a deciding factor. It was a horrible thing I would never forget though it was nothing that was going to deter me from seeing everything Cleo wanted me to see.

"Did they even kidnap you?" She mentioned underage labor and what I was presented with was child labor. Perhaps kidnapping was an euphemism for something else and the people that had killed the kleens had just decided to break in and it was just a large coincidence.

"Yes, how could you ask such a thing?!" She looked shocked and hurt. I felt like an asshole and hated myself for it.

"Well I just…Well there’s…"

"I’m just messing with you Tom. That prick of a butler I had turned out to be working for my father…I gotta go. If you write a story on all this I will make you happy for many years Tom." Her tongue peeked out from between her lips for a moment. I almost said I will do anything you ever ask. Somehow I managed to keep my mouth shut.

"I’m such a pussy Bevisste."

"Yes. Yes you are at times." Bevisste agreed with me.

"Thanks for the boost in confidence. Appreciate it."  I stood up and looked out on the thousands of children being forced to put together holoscreens for greedy people that had nothing better to do than complain about the blown out colors or contrast levels. I felt an urge to immediately go home and throw away my holoscreen. "I’m going to do something about this Bevisste. I don’t have a fucking clue what; but I will. I didn’t fight for the sovereignty and democracy of The United Planets to let it become this."

"Catch and I will help you however we can." Bevisste replied.

"Thanks. How far away is this other address?"

"Opposite side of the city about seventy miles away." Bevisste replied.

"Of course. Why not. Get me to the closest motel, I’ll go in the morning."

Next Chapter: Demons come in all shapes and sizes